Robert Staples YES

"Black Deprivation-White Privilege: The Assault On Affirmative Action"

The current furor over affirmative action has many of us perplexed. Somehow, black Americans have shifted, in image, from being violent criminals, drug dealers, wife beaters, sexual harassers, welfare cheaters and under-class members to privileged members of the middle-class, who acquired their jobs through some racial quota system at the expense of white males who had superior qualifications for those same jobs. It is a testament to the ingenuity of white male politicians, using the race card, that they can exploit the historicallyingrained prejudice against black Americans in the direction of the small black middle-class. For the last twenty-five years, the use of racial code issues, such as law and order, revising the welfare system
and the tax revolt has served to transform the southern states from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican majority among its white population.
However, Republicans are increasingly becoming victims of their own success. White Democratic candidates have become as vigilantly anti-crime and welfare as their Republican opponents. In the Louisiana
gubernatorial race of 1995, even the black candidates reached out to those whites seeking harsher sentences for criminals, the overwhelming majority of offenders being black in that particular state. While this situation
illustrates that there is no honor among thieves, i.e. politicians, it also demonstrates that the diminishing returns of the racial code issues have created a dilemma among the Republican right. Into this void steps the
issue of affirmative action, an innocuous program devised more than thirty years ago by President John E Kennedy to increase the employment of blacks in the public sector. It was expanded by President Richard M. Nixon, who personally believed blacks were intellectually inferior, to include other people of color and white women.
All this occurred at a time when white males held an almost total monopoly of all top and mid-level professional and managerial jobs in the US. Blacks and women who were qualified could not penetrate the
barriers to white collar employment except in very special niches for white women (e.g. nursing, home economics or teaching) and a small number of professional blacks who serviced the black community. Subsequently, there was some reduction in the exclusive white male monopoly in the white collar occupations and affirmative action was only one of the reasons for the change. The shift from a manufacturing to a service based economy was a big factor in increasing female employment. And the racial violence of the late 1960s convinced the ruling elites that some blacks had to be brought into white dominated institutions to bring about racial tranquility.
As for affirmative action, there is no consensus on what it is, who are its beneficiaries or what it has achieved. I will not try to define it, since the practice runs the gamut from including people of color and women in the pool of applicants for vacant positions to establishing explicit racial and gender quotas in some institutional spheres. The beneficiaries are generally blacks, Latinos, American Indians, sometimes Asians and women, the disabled, and military veterans. It is estimated that as many as five million people of color have gotten their jobs directly through affirmative action.
However, such figures cannot be validated because affirmative action operates in such a complex and convoluted way. What we do know is that there has been a small shift in the number of blacks who can be regarded as middle-class. Most estimates are generally in the range of one-third of the Afro-American population. The progress for black women has been greater, as recent census figures show that among young black college graduates, women earn more than men. The progress for white women is more complicated to measure, because the majority of them are married to white men and share the same standard of living. Nonetheless, there has been some economic and educational progress for all affected groups and affirmative action is, at least, partly responsible for this progress because it requires employers to be racial and
gender inclusive. What has been overshadowed in this debate is that these groups make up about 70 percent of the American population. White males, the alleged victims of affirmative action compose about 30 percent
of the population and still hold about 75 percent of the highest earning occupations in this country, and 95 percent at the very top.
Somehow, some way, this whole issue has been distorted into a prevailing belief that white men are the victims of affirmative action and that their rights have been trampled on. Underlying this belief is the assump-
tion that white males are entitled to 100 percent of the high paying occupations, as they had prior to 1965, because they are intellectually superior to people of color and women. That such a notion could have any credence should be absurd on the face of it. Still, it will be upheld in an initiative on the California ballot in 1996, as it was in July of 1995, when the University of California Regents abolished affirmative action in admissions and employment. And this occurred in a state where half the population are
people of color and white, non-Hispanic, males compose twenty percent of the state’s population.
1 will now address the issue of affirmative action in the state of cultural, social and political elements. Its borders house both the radicals of Berkeley and the John Birch Society of Orange County. Not only is
California the most populous of the 50 states, it is one of the most racially diverse. Latinos, Asians, blacks and American Indians make up one half of the state’s population. Politically it can be a progressive state, since blacks and women have held a higher number of elective offices there than in any other state. Yet, in the last thirty years the state has experienced (1) the passage of a state proposition to legalize racial discrimination in housing, which was declared unconstitutional by the courts, (2) the uprooting of every black person, by white groups, from their homes in the town of Taft, (3) the election of a member of the Ku Klux Klan as the Democratic candidate for a US Congressional seat and (4) the passage of proposition 187, which denies medical treatment and education to undocumented aliens and their children, most of whom are considered people of color.
With this historical backdrop, the Board of Regents of the University of California met in San Francisco on July 20, 1995 to vote on the issue of abolishing affirmative action in admissions and employment. Until this
date, there had been no ground swell of public desire to end a program that had existed for 25 years, in a state where blacks and Latinos compose 40 percent of the pool of potential students. But, the Governor, Pete
Wilson, who is running for the Republican nomination for president, was way behind in the polls and needed to show he could actually do something about this “wedge issue” that the Republican party discovered in
1995. Typical of 1990s politics, Wilson has a black man, Ward Connerly, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, to lead the fight to abolish affirmative action. All those involved in the university-the faculty, administration, student groups and alumni were opposed to its abolishment. The vote was a mere formality, as almost all the white male regents were Republican appointees, and by a vote of 15-10, became the first public university to abolish affirmative action.
One would think it a risky political move in a state where people of color make up 50 percent of the population. However, because many latinos and Asians are recent immigrants, some undocumented, the voting population is 80 percent white. As Mark Di Camillo, of the California Poll commented, “when you do public opinion polling, you see that whites are much more sensitive to issues that relate to the future of California and the position of whites. They probably have greater concern about their own self-interest.” Of course, a substantial number of Asians and some Latinos were also opposed to affirmative action at the University of California. The issue is often framed as a black/white one, though blacks make up only 8 percent of the state’s population, less than 6 percent of the UC student body and 2 percent of the faculty. By far, the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, due to their larger numbers, are white women. Yet they are hardly mentioned in this debate, partly because they are a1so 52 nercent of white voters and their husbands depend on them.
It is not clear what effect the UC Regents’ votes will have on the racial and gender balance of the UC campuses. The president of the University of California, Jack Petalson, issued a statement saying, “Few significant changes are likely because UC’s employment and contracting programs are governed by state and federal laws, regulations, executive orders and t he US Constitution.” Because affirmative action is such an innocuous program, it has created strange political bedfellows. Richard Butler, a leading white supremacist and head of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nation hailed Governor Wilson for his support of the UC Regents‘ decision. He said that “Wilson is beginning to wake up to Aryan views.” At the same time, arch conservatives such as Jack Kemp and William Bennett, who are not running for public office, have reaffirmed their support for affirmative action.
This whole debate tends to obscure some of the real issues for the black community. As Jesse Jackson has noted, ”There is substantial evidence that affirmative action is inadequately enforced and too narrowly applied.” Blacks hold only 4 percent of professional and managerial positions in the US and are a fraction of 1 percent of senior managers in America’s major corporations. At the same time, almost a majority of black males are not in the civilian labor force. About 25 percent of young black males are in prison, on probation or parole. Even if white males can reclaim that 4 per- cent of the executive positions, it will do little to restore them to the 100 percent monopoly they once held.
An essential piece of the attack on affirmative action is that it unfairly discriminates against white males. To accept this premise is to assume that every white male is superior to every woman and person of color. Why else should they control 100 percent of the top positions in the society: for example, in the government contract set asides about 25 percent of the work is often delegated to people of color and women. Presumably, the other 75 percent is held by “deserving“ white males. If that aspect of affirmative action is eliminated, white males will get all the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds that go to private companies. As for how white males have achieved such an advantage in this one sphere, far in excess of
their percentage of the population. It may have more to do with the fact that other white males are making the decisions on whom to award those those contracts - not on the merits of a true competition for them.
The center of the white male argument is that they possess skills other groups do not have, particularly as measured by their performance on standardized tests. Thus, they pretend that those tests are valid measures of merit and use them to exclude all but white males from the top paying occupations. It is, indeed, true that they are better test takers than women and people of color-in part because they created and administer the tests. Other research, also by white males, suggests that many of those exams have no relevance to job performance, contain a cultural bias that favors middle- class.It is hard pressed to name many cases where individuals, hired under affirmative action, lack the necessary skills to do a job for which they are hired.

In reality, most people in this country are capable of performing well at a variety of occupations, because most of what they learn, in performing occupational tasks, is on the job itself. Since there are not enough “desirable and high paying jobs for all the qualified applicants, the system devises arbitrary screening devices such as educational requirements and standardized tests to weed out people. Because white males in the US are socialized into a sense of entitlement to the most prestigious and highest paying positions, they are generally better positioned to take advantage of the those arbitrary screening devices. Moreover, studies over the years have found that between 35-65 percent Americans find their jobs through contacts made via the friends and kinship network, a practice that partly accounts for the white male dominance of senior positions in both the private and public sector.
Affirmative action has experienced some abuses. Why people of color and women are held responsible for the abuses is a mystery, since white males are chiefly responsible for administering affirmative action programs. The greatest abuses seem to occur in the contract set asides, where a few black and Latinos have served as fronts to get government contracts that actually go to Anglo contractors. Another problem has been the classification of racial minorities. Because people with a small percentage of Indian ancestry can live as white Americans, they face no disadvantage different from other whites in this society. Yet, they have often qualified for affirmative action treatment. The problem of white usurpation of Indian identity was so prevalent that American Indians wanted to retain their original name, albeit a misnomer, because so many whites were claiming the title of Native Americans and receiving benefits designed for oppressed American
Indians.
Some opponents of affirmative action have suggested replacing its racial/gender components with that of socioeconomic status, which would also include poor whites. Of course poor whites are already included in
university recruitment and admission of students as well as being part of the disabled and military veteran category. However it is unfair to equate a low socioeconomic status with the disadvantages of race and gender. A poor white male who gets a college education and a middle-class job simply increases the number of white males in the ruling elite. His problems we over, while women and people of color will continue to encounter glass ceilings in education and employment. And blacks who are middle- class do not escape anything but the economic problems associated with being black. Because the oppression is aimed at the entire group, the politica1 remedies should go to all visible members of the black population.
Finally, this attack on affirmative action is nothing more than a replay of history for Afro-Americans. Slavery was defended with a variety of rationalizations, including the inferiority of blacks, the need to make
blacks Christians and the slaveowners’property rights. rights Racial segregation.

Now, we have the anomaly of having white males, a third of the population who make up 95 percent of those who run America, control and distribute 90 percent of the nation’s wealth, trying to portray themselves as victims because women and people of color finally broke their grip on all the society’s resources. Their attack on affirmative action can only be characterized as political and economic overkill.
However, despite its absurdity, the assault has the potential to succeed. Politicians have had the wisdom to target blacks as the main recipients of affirmative action, while ignoring the fact that white women make up as much as 80 percent of the beneficiaries. This allows them to get the votes of white women, who may act on their interests as whites and ignore their interests as women. To the degree that they empathize and share
households with white males, they have less to lose. Single white women, female heads-of-households and lesbians, will be sacrificed on the altar of larger white interests. Blacks, historically, make a convenient scapegoat for the decline of capitalism and the whites who are casualties of that decline. While they comprise a small percentage of those subject to affirmative action, they remain a national target of prejudice and stereotyping in every corner of the nation.
The notion of a color blind society, with no need for affirmative action, is a fantasy at this point. Race is the most divisive variable extant in the US. Whites commonly betray their class interests on its behalf and
individual life chances for both blacks and whites are a direct function of it. Affirmative action is but one tool-not a very effective one-to mitigate its effect. The attack on it is part of a white plan to make people of color their servants again, while they continue to obligate them to pay taxes to subsidize white privilege. What whites may find is they may not want to live in the world they are creating.

 

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